Abstracts

Meng-Shi Chen (Bio)

Ethics of Curating as Hospitality

This paper aims to sketch an ethics of curating inspired by Levinas’s and Derrida’s thoughts on hospitality. Taking the word “curate” in its root meaning of “caring for” allows us to expand the curatorial sphere primarily based on aesthetics to ethics. Regarding curation not only as selection, design, interpretation, and presentation (of artworks), but also “caring” or “care-taking” revealed in the intersubjective and intimate relations is supposed not to be only an issue of aesthetic knowledge and taste, but also an ethical interpellation and response. While the ethical aspect of curating seems to be apparent, the argument about the ethics of curating is actually recently developed. The aim of this paper is therefore trying to fortify the argument about the ethical aspect of art curation. Contrast to deontological ethics, the normative theories emphasizing our duties and the moral choices of what ought to do, I argue that the curatorial ethics is better approached through the idea of the “ethics of hospitality,” in which the deconstructive relationship of hôte (host/guest) reflects well the relationship of curators, artists, or the participating third parties. While the curator unconditionally welcomes the curated artists and their works as a kind of completely open hospitality, he or she needs to use various resources conditionally, including professional knowledge, communication, choices that often contains conflicts, etc., to achieve this unconditionality. When applying conditional ideas and resources, he or she also loses the unconditional hospitality. Actually, the displacement of host/guest in hospitality as the relationship between One/Other is always the curators’ principal ethical concern. I conclude that after formal regulations and obligation is put into question which lead to the indeterminacy for the complicated and sophisticated ethical concerns of curators, to grasp the ethics of curating through hospitality in terms of Levinas and Derrida is therefore much more sensible in both theoretical and practical levels.